Ken Webb 2010-03-31T18:15:11Z
C# is a programming language developed by Microsoft as part of .NET . From a Xholon perspective, it has some interesting features.
C# delegates and events provide a programmatic way to decouple connections between objects. They could provide a way to help implement ports in a future C# implementation of Xholon. Since I don't know very much yet about C#, do a web search for more information on delegates and events.
The Microsoft MSDN pages (English U.S.) provide excellent tutorials.
Many Xholon applications use asynchronous messaging. C# supports asynchronous delegates. However, the target of a C# asynchronous request will be called on a separate thread, whereas Xholon depends on being able to do asynchronous messaging all on the same thread. So it's not clear yet if the C# mechanism could be used in Xholon.
Since Xholon is an open-source project, it tries to use open-source software whenever possible. Mono provides an open-source implementation of C# and .NET.
Another interesting project is IKVM, which can transform Java bytecode into .NET Common Intermediate Language (CIL). So it might be possible to automatically transform the Xholon framework into executable .NET code. C# applications (and applications in other Common Language Infrastructure (CLI) languages) could then be built on top of Xholon, the same way that Java applications can now do this. IKVM does not support Java Swing, so the optional Xholon GUI would not be available.